I’ve often said that one of my favorite elements of the Doctor/Master conflict over the years has been the underlying message: The Master is simply what The Doctor might have become, and might still become, if his penchant for pushing the universe to act according to his moral compass weren’t balanced by the “conscience” provided by his Companions.  Never has this been more directly handled than in this capstone to Series 8, which also serves as the wrap-up of nearly every Clara-centric plot thread.

 

I criticized the previous episode (and much of the season) for dropping the ball with the two big questions related to The Doctor: his sense of identity and his search for Gallifrey.  I dare say that both were ignored far too much over the course of the season, the latter to a much greater extent, but the resolution in this finale is enough to push Series 9 into new territory.  The Doctor has come to terms with himself, having faced the gauntlet of temptation, and now knows that Gallifrey is out there somewhere, even if it’s not where The Master said it would be.

 

I was quite concerned about the motivations of The Master, as it would be all too easy to simply have Missy doing all these questionable things out of utter madness.  Instead, Missy was acting on a deep understanding of exactly what kind of person would be able to push The Doctor’s buttons.  There are still some coincidental elements to the whole notion that The Master was working towards this endgame, when The Doctor’s survival beyond his Eleven persona was completely in doubt (in story, anyway), but it’s a minor nitpick.  The Master doesn’t win by taking control of the universe or destroying it; at this point, The Master wins by persuading The Doctor to take the same path.

 

By making it a war of philosophies, it makes the whole Cyberman plot work.  The Master creates an army by wiping out The Doctor’s primary source of “conscience”, and then hands it over to The Doctor to use for something of a Time Lord jihad.  In other words, not the softer defiance of Time Lord ethics that The Doctor tries to employ, but nothing less than the complete and utter antithesis of everything the Time Lords profess to believe.  And so the Cybermen, despite being a huge threat, are only a potential one, if rather unsettling.

 

For all that Moffat gets a lot of well-deserved criticism for how he’s written female characters in the past, it’s worth noting that Danny is the character that is killed and further manipulated for no other reason than to allow Clara to come to full realization of her own motives.  Danny, in other words, is and has been essentially a plot device.  I’m not entirely sold on the notion that Danny would retain enough of himself to still protect Clara, but this episode did a great deal to explore what becoming a Cyberman actually means.  It was more effective than, for instance, the treatment of the concept on Torchwood.

 

If there is one weakness to the episode, it’s Moffat’s inability to keep to reasonable scale.  The Doctor could have been press-ganged by UNIT without turning him into the “President of Earth”, with all the enormously problematic implications of such a thing.  What if The Doctor wasn’t available in such a time of crisis, for example?  The exact same level of authority could have been granted without overplaying that hand, since it was only a minor point in the larger web that The Master had devised.

 

One final note: everything points to the 2014 Christmas Special to be the coda for Clara’s tenure as The Doctor’s companion.  It’s worth noting that this could be one of the more amusing red herrings of the Modern Who era, though I admit I may be reaching!